Determining Your PPC Cost Per Click

In PPC advertising, you need to set a maximum bid that you are willing to pay per click. This total bid price will help determine the position of your ad although in most cases it won't be necessary to pay this figure. Various factors determine the actual amount you pay, but by setting a reasonable maximum bid price you know that you will never need to pay more than that amount for each of your resulting visitors.

Google and other PPC advertising networks use a quality score that is determined by a number of factors pertaining to your ad, your campaign, and even the content of your page. The greater the quality of these components the better your quality score. This, in turn, means that you will need to pay less per click than the maximum bid you set.

You only ever need pay the lowest amount necessary to gain the position you want. Even if your maximum bid is set much higher than the next highest bid, you will only have to pay a cost per click that will gain you the top position. However, you should be careful not to set the maximum bid price too high in case another advertiser bids similarly high and you will need to pay more.

The PPC click price that you actually pay is often considerably less than the maximum bid that you enter. Many networks have the option to automatically set your bid price to gain a certain position, although this can lead you down the path to financial ruin and manually setting and changing the maximum bid price itself is the preferred option.